UK UK MSP VMhosts Selects Vesper Intel and DataCore All-Flash Appliance

DataCore Software Corporation confirmed that VMhosts Ltd, a UK based MSP, has selected Vesper‘s Intel and DataCore all-flash appliances to serve their pay-as- you-go virtualisation infrastructure services from their data centres located in Welwyn Garden City and Enfield.

Like all MSPs looking to differentiate and grow, VMhost’s ongoing delivery challenge is to meet and exceed SLAs for downtime, performance and ease of management for data and applications, whilst ensuring all services remain competitively priced. Its user base is diverse, from SMBs to high profile insurance, hotel and charitable organisations with large and varied requirements for performance I/O and data volumes.

Michael Custance, senior virtualisation consultant, VMhosts details: “This was a migration to secure future flexibility and service levels for our customers and provide granular control that our existing arrays simply could not offer. Our go-to technology provider, Vesper, suggested that we stretch test their new Vesper Intel based appliance overlaid with DataCore’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) to give us the flex we need, now and in the foreseeable future.“

Vesper’s proposal to run customer VMs alongside Vesper’s SDS pre-enabled and integrated storage appliances offered a logical path to meeting uptime levels. Regardless of size, VMhosts customers have one desire: minimal downtime across trading hours. Some customers require a continual 24×7 trading window (such as an insurance company trading in both UK and Australia) so VMhosts have to be certain of meeting their 99.95% SLA for customer uptime. Detailed stretch testing proved the required availability levels and more.

One Stop For Seamless Rollout and Ongoing Support
Rollout of two x 25TB Vesper all-flash appliances in the Enfield data centre commenced in Spring. Onsite installation was fast and trouble-free as the hardware and software were integrated pre-install. For continued single point of assurance, Vesper continues to provide VMhosts with a single line of support.

Increased performance was the first winner. After install, client application response times increased 10 fold due to the combination of Intel Optane as tier-1 storage backed by an all Intel NVMe capacity tier to guarantee fast data throughput layered with DataCore’s caching algorithms and the software’s parallel I/O architecture. One knock-on effect of the set and forget performance boost sits within VMhosts own benchmarking environment – the ultimate test bed for perspective new customers. The platform performance has become a showcase to convince these prospective customers just how fast their data could be served – directly delivering ROI for the company.

Scale-Up, Scale-Out, Vesper’s Ultimate Flex right for the VMhosts Service Model
With a pay as you grow licencing model, the Vesper appliances offer VMhosts the scale and flex platform, adding individual disks as needed via the DataCore management GUI. This flex is critical to MSPs providing customers with in-built reassurance that should their needs spike, VMhosts’ MSP infrastructure can ably cope. For instance, one well-known VMhosts not-for-profit customer hosts an annual fundraising day in the UK when £ millions of transactions and contributions are processed within a 24-hour period.

Custance elaborates further: “We had come from a fairly restricted environment when it came to carving up storage space and provisioning extra disk, so the addition of SDS suddenly offered us the ultimate management layer, right here at our fingertips. Meaning when we are now asked for an extra 10TB of storage we can confidently state, no problem, it’s just a few clicks away.“

The software licensing model also serves VMhosts well, starting low and building, paying only for the data that is presented to VMware rather than paying for multiple copies of data offered in other subscriptions. The HA two node configuration also reduces Capex as most HA platforms require at least three, or sometimes four nodes, to start.

Custance reflects: “For us, the ability of the software to scale has given us a great start point into SDS. The HA and performance are compelling and we will shortly be replicating the installation success in our Welwyn Garden City data centre.“

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